Munich. The year 1972. Tuesday, September 5. It was twenty minutes past four in the morning. Eight guerrillas from the radical Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, dressed in tracksuits and carrying backpacks stuffed with grenades and Kalashnikov rifles, jumped over a flimsy fence and stormed the Olympic Village. Members of the American delegation, more drunk than alert, mistook them for partygoers. The unarmed police officers assumed they were beer-fuelled gladiators. They were wrong.
Germany’s decision to erase the image left by the Second World War by staging the biggest international event while deliberately playing down security would prove catastrophic. With the way clear, the terrorists headed for 31 Connollystrasse, where the delegations of Uruguay, Hong Kong and their intended target, Israel, were staying. In less than two minutes, they had forced their way through the door of Apartment No. 1. Joseph Gutfreund shouted, “Chevre, tistatru!” The wrestling referee had woken seconds earlier to the noise of the intruders and, through a crack in the door, had seen a group of masked men. He tried to block the entrance while yelling, “Friends, protect yourselves!” His 130-kilogram frame allowed his colleague Tuvia Sokolovsky to escape.
The gang leader, Lutiff Afif, known as “Issa,” the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, moved on to the other rooms. There he encountered Moshe Weinberg. The wrestling coach survived the gunpowder blast to the face but was killed by a bullet to the chest. The guerrillas moved on to Apartment No. 3. They were lucky. Six athletes only opened their eyes to find carbines pressed against the backs of their heads. The wrestler Gad Tsabari seized a miraculous moment of distraction and fled in a zigzag, just as he had learned to do in the army. Joseph Romano, on crutches because of an injury, was shot in the lung and eardrum and died. Nine athletes were now in the hands of the radical wing of Arafat’s movement, including fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who had only just arrived, along with two bodies.
The Games of Peace would turn into a war that lasted twenty-three hours. The first demand came in the language of the country. “Issa” had studied in West Germany for eight years: “Get in touch with the Israeli government.” Shortly afterwards, three sheets of paper typed in English were dropped from the window, setting out their demands: the release of 234 prisoners held in Israeli jails and two more imprisoned in Germany, as well as safe passage to take the hostages in three aircraft to an Arab country. Prime Minister Golda Meir did not need even a fraction of a second to decide: there would be no negotiations with terrorists. She offered an elite unit to carry out a rescue operation. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt immediately rejected the proposal, aware that a diplomatic deadlock would only heighten the tension. Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Bavarian Interior Secretary Bruno Merk, and Munich Police Chief Manfred Schreiber negotiated with “Issa,” who appeared wearing a white hat and a black mask.
With every proposal — unlimited sums of money, an exchange of the hostages for any other prominent figure in the Federal Republic — “Issa” kept saying no. That afternoon, the West Germans hastily improvised a rudimentary rescue attempt. Police officers in tracksuits climbed onto the roof of the building with the intention of catching the kidnappers by surprise. They had forgotten that every room was equipped with video surveillance. It was the terrorists themselves who reminded them that they were watching the footage and warned that any move would result in the hostages being executed. A new plan was eventually drawn up after the terrorists’ demand to go to Egypt was accepted.
A succession of mistakes
Inexplicably, the strategy would culminate in a succession of fatal blunders. Sixteen officers were ready for action aboard the Boeing 727 positioned on the military runway at Fürstenfeldbruck. But instead, the police, believing the operation was too risky, withdrew without informing the central command. It hardly mattered: central command, in turn, had forgotten to request armoured ground support, and when it finally did, the tanks arrived too late. The authorities had prepared an operation involving just five poorly trained marksmen, with no radios and no centralised communications. It was only when the hostages were being transported from the Olympic Village by bus to two helicopters that they realised there were more terrorists than they had thought: eight, not five.
Photographer Eduardo Gageiro was there and, despite the difficulty of getting into the area, captured the moment. “At some point, I remembered that my accreditation looked like the athletes’ — it only had one extra letter. I joined a group of them and got in disguised as an athlete. I went to the Portuguese delegation, which was on the 16th floor, and from the balcony I took the sequence of photographs.” Carlos Lopes, who competed at the Munich Games, would be an unusual case: “I don’t remember anything, and at the time the whole thing passed me by.”
The helicopters were positioned on the wrong side, preventing two of the marksmen from doing their job. The end began when the terrorists discovered that the aircraft in question was empty. Feeling deceived, they opened fire. Amid the chaos, Zvi Zamir, then head of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service), tried to negotiate, but without success. The information the police gave the press that night was far from the truth: “All the athletes are safe and all the terrorists are dead.” The arrival of the armoured vehicles terrified the terrorists. One of them fired a machine gun at a helicopter and threw a grenade. Berger, Friedman, Halfin and Springer were killed in the explosion. Then another terrorist executed the hostages in the second helicopter: Gutfreund, Shapira, Shorr, Slavin and Spitzer. One police officer was killed in the crossfire, five terrorists were shot dead, and three were taken to a German prison. Even so, they had only caught glimpses of the full picture.
In October of that year, a group hijacked a Lufthansa aircraft in Lebanon and demanded the release of those involved in the Munich attack. The fact that the German government agreed amounted to a green light for the retaliatory operation devised by Golda Meir’s office — an unambiguous policy of revenge — to move forward.
Israel’s counterattack
“Operation Wrath of God” began in Rome on October 16, 1972. Wael Zwaiter, who maintained Black September’s main operational base in Europe, was hit by two bullets from a .22 Beretta. Next came Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris. Mossad agents posed as journalists, planted a bomb beneath the table where his telephone stood, and called him from a public phone. He answered, and that was it: a detonating signal sent through the telephone line triggered the explosion. Hamshari died in hospital the following day.
From a distance, they also detonated a device beneath the bed of Al Chir, in a hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus, who was responsible for the link between Black September and the KGB. On a Paris street, three bursts of gunfire killed Basil Al-Kubaissi, an activist with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
To kill Abu Yussef, Fatah’s number-three figure, Kamel Adwan, head of PLO operations, and Kamal Nasser, the PLO spokesman, Mossad deployed some of the country’s finest soldiers, among them Ehud Barak. In the early hours of April 10, 1973, the current Israeli defence minister dressed as a woman in an operation in Lebanon that lasted thirty minutes.
Only Ali Hassan Salameh remained, the organiser of the Munich attack and operational chief of Black September. A fatal mistake followed. Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan employee at a Swedish winter sports resort, was killed in front of his pregnant wife. The result: six agents arrested. The manhunt then cooled off.
It heated up again in January 1979, when Ali Hassan met his death in a car bomb on a street in Beirut. Atef Bseiso, the mastermind of the Palestinian intelligence services, may have been the last name on the list. His life came to an end on June 8, 1992, in front of the Méridien Montparnasse Hotel in the City of Light.
“Operation Spring of Youth”
Sayeret Matkal, the elite special forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces, took part in what was a clandestine military operation within the framework of “Operation Wrath of God.” Sixteen soldiers landed on a beach near Beirut. Waiting for them were Israeli drivers who had previously infiltrated the country. They were driven to the building where the three leaders of Black September were staying. Divided into three groups, they stormed the apartments and killed their targets in a barrage of 55 rounds. Half an hour later, they were back in Israel.
During the operation, Ehud Barak disguised himself as a woman: blonde wig, prosthetic breasts, stockings and high heels. The aim was to get past a border guard.
The group’s name has its roots in the conflict between the PLO and Jordan, when, on September 16, 1970, in response to an attempted coup led by fedayeen, King Hussein II killed and expelled thousands of Palestinians. It began as a Fatah cell; the PLO and the Syrian military faction As-Sa’iqa later joined it.
Although Black September is best known for the murder of eleven Israeli athletes in Munich, its record of operations was extensive: an attempted assassination of the Jordanian ambassador in London, sabotage of a Dutch gas plant, the hijacking of a Belgian aircraft, an attack on the Saudi Arabian embassy in Sudan, and letter bombs.
